Tools to Prepare for the Raging Waters

by
Peter Ruffini | Jul 01, 2014

With continued low inventory being the driving market force so far this year I thought I’d write a little bit about preparation. Many market areas are still presenting highly competitive conditions for
buyers and because of that it’s important to make sure they are fully prepared for the raging waters they are about to jump into.

Now more than ever, buyers are coming to us ready to go right into the home search part of the home buying process. But taking some time to sit down with buyers to educate them on current market conditions, the home buying process and procuring
financing is vitally important in order to avoid frustration and failure.

Luckily as REALTORS® we have a great resource available to help us educate buyers. MAR compiles and analyzes sales and pending sales of single family, multi-family and condominiums from all three of our state’s MLSs to produce its Local Market Data. It is a suite of reports providing you with town by town comparisons, market trends and
historical data. Plus new to the suite in July of 2014 is a Market One Sheet, which quickly summarizes the market confidence indexes, the pending sales and the closed sales, and a new option to customize reports with your company logo. Buyers will not only be impressed with the reports but also fully informed of the marketplace they are searching.

It’s also advisable to spend some time on the topic of negotiating – BEFORE you’re actually negotiating. I believe that one of the biggest mistakes a REALTOR® can make is to assume that the buyer will be comfortable with how you’d like to handle the negotiations once you get to the offer stage – especially when they are likely to be in a multiple offer situation.

Sellers can also benefit greatly from preparation. When they make the decision to sell they are eager to hit the market, but knowing how multiple offers will be handled and again, how you’d prefer to handle the negotiations in general, are important to establish
up front.

Take advantage of another resource we have at our fingertips. REALTOR® Magazine, our National Association publication recently produced a Negotiation Tool Kit. You can find it at Realtormag.Realtor.org. It breaks down tips and articles by different components of negotiations to help us understand the complex relationships that sometimes clash when trying to structure a deal, and how to take an offer through the negotiation process to the closing table.

To succeed in a competitive market like today’s we need all the help we can get to be prepared and at the ready.

About MAR

The Massachusetts Association of REALTORS® is a professional trade association for licensed real estate practitioners and is affiliated with the state's 13 local REALTOR® associations.